Communist Party of Indiana v. Whitcomb (1974)

Case Summary

In 1972, the Communist Party of Indiana was denied a place on
the presidential ballot because it refused to provide an affidavit,
sworn under oath, that it did not advocate the forcible overthrow of
the government. After losing a court challenge, the Party appealed to
the Supreme Court.

The Court's Decision

The Court held that the loyalty oath requirement violated the
First and Fourteenth Amendments. Justice William Brennan wrote the
majority opinion, which was joined by four other justices. He argued
that, although older Supreme Court cases had held that advocating
violent political economic change was so dangerous that the government
could outlaw it entirely, many more recent cases had changed this rule
to give more weight to free speech. Brennan further held that the
Constitution largely gives the States the power to supervise
elections, but they must exercise this power constitutionally. A State
may not limit a party's access to the ballot or restrict voters'
constitutional right of association merely because members of the
party believe in something.

Justice Lewis Powell wrote a concurring opinion in which three
other Justices joined. He argued that the majority reached the right
result in the case, but for the wrong reasons. In Powell's view, the
Court should not have considered the more complex question whether the
Indiana oath was constitutional. Since in this case the Republican and
Democratic Parties were not required to submit affidavits accepting
the oath, he wrote, there was no justification for placing a burden on
the Communist Party that was not placed on the other established
parties. Powell concluded Indiana had denied the plaintiffs the equal
protection of laws under the Fourteenth Amendment.

More on the Case

The Supreme Court has considered other cases in which States
attempted to exclude people from voting or to prevent them from
running for elected office for a variety of reasons. In
Richardson v. Ramirez, 1974,
the Court ruled that California could constitutionally prevent
convicted felons from voting. Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented from
the Court's opinion, arguing that a State cannot “strip
ex-felons who have fully paid their debt to society of their
fundamental right to vote without running afoul of the Fourteenth
Amendment.”Although some people worried that convicted felons
might vote to undermine the criminal laws, Marshall relied on
Whitcomb to argue that potential differences of
opinion or matters of belief cannot be used to exclude anyone from the
electoral process.

In Chandler v. Miller,
1997, the Court reviewed a Georgia law requiring candidates for
certain State offices to certify that they have received a negative
result on a urinalysis drug test within 30 days before qualifying for
nomination or election. Writing for the Court, Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg found that the testing requirement unconstitutionally
interfered with candidates' personal privacy. She relied on
Whitcomb to support her argument that
“States…enjoy wide latitude to establish conditions of candidacy
for State office, but in setting such conditions, they may not
disregard basic constitutional protections.”